[FRIAM] Getting You Libertarians' Goats

[Steve Smith]

EricC -

Thanks for your thought out, coherent summary/analysis.   I think you
cover the issues (as I see them) well, conflating credentials with
competence or capability (while there is a correlation, sometimes it is
negative, and in fact it is just a tiny subdomain within a higher
dimensional space).  

My own collapse/summary of the topic is that there is a complex tension
between the instincts of the individual as organism and the individual
as a member of a family/community/tribe/species/nation/culture/planet...   

I have been trying to let Glen's offering of Anarcho-Syndicalism settle
in my heart/brain/soul a little more before I "respond-from-the-hip".  
While I don't expect this particular convolution of the above issues to
be "an answer", it does sound like a useful "stalking horse" to think
from (closest idiom to what I previously used "strawman" to achieve).

- SteveS

On 9/18/20 6:20 AM, Eric Charles wrote:
> So.... delayed response to the original... based on the longer reviews
> I've seen, this is partially a criticism of meritocracy itself, but
> also a very strong criticism of the neo-liberal bastardization of
> meritocracy. As it says in the opening line of the review in the
> original post: The thing being criticized are "pernicious assumptions"
> about merit. From what I can tell, his TED talk summarizes the book
> well: https://www.ted.com/talks/michael_sandel_the_tyranny_of_merit 
>
> He starts out with some discussion of moral luck, but in my opinion
> not a great discussion of it. Then he moves on to criticize a world
> where pieces of paper are confused for ability. In such a world, those
> without the right pieces of paper are deemed to lack merit and are
> told they can't have dignity. That part is criticizing a world in
> which our leaders continuously message that everyone should go to
> college, encouraging a false belief that a getting a degree somehow
> magically makes you successful, and encouraging the implicit (or
> sometimes explicit) judgement that not getting a degree somehow a
> personal failure and that getting a degree and then not succeeding is
> an incoherent position to be in. The failure of that program of
> thought has been huge. It is hard to explain how many of the students
> I taught at Penn State Altoona had their lives made worse by getting a
> degree. They are working the same jobs they could have worked out of
> high school, but with 4 years less experience, added shame and
> frustration, crippling debt, and a worse relationship with parents who
> can't understand why having a degree hasn't made their kids
> successful. And you can't try to defend this by hand-waving at
> education being virtuous in its own right, but it won't work, because
> by any reasonable measure they aren't very educated either. 
>
> Even with as right as some parts of that critique are, it is all
> somehow seething with the suspect rhetoric of the protestant work
> ethic. There is nothing inherently virtuous in being exploited for
> your labor (in the Marxist sense of providing profit to a capitalist),
> and he is somehow lumping all "work" together in a way that obscures
> that. 
>
> When all is said and done, it is an interesting argument, but my
> Libertarian Goat is doing fine, thank you :- )
>
>
>
>
> On Sun, Sep 13, 2020 at 1:28 PM <thompnickson2 at gmail.com
> <mailto:thompnickson2 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     This should do it!
>
>      
>
>     https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/michael-j-sandel/the-tyranny-of-merit/
>
>      
>
>     The thesis is that “meritocracy” is the cause of the fact that the
>     us is now the least socially mobile country among the western
>     democracies. 
>
>      
>
>     Nick
>
>      
>
>     Nicholas Thompson
>
>     Emeritus Professor of Ethology and Psychology
>
>     Clark University
>
>     ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com <mailto:ThompNickSon2 at gmail.com>
>
>     https://wordpress.clarku.edu/nthompson/
>
>      
>
>      
>
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